Camera Review: Nikon Coolpix P50

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Nikon has chosen a somewhat confusing way of choosing scene selection. In Nikon cameras, you have "Modes" and "Scenes." The modes for the P50 are Portrait, Landscape and Night Portrait. Additionally, the dial contains Program, Manual, High ISO and Fully Automatic. This is confusing to the user because there's also a "Scene" selection option that's accessed by pressing the menu button and displays on the LCD screen. The scenes are Sports, Party/Indoor, Beach/Snow, Dusk/Dawn, Night Landscape, Close-up, Museum, Fireworks Show, Copy, Backlight, Panoramic Assist and Voice Recording. It wasn't intuitive or obvious why Nikon chose to segregate the three Mode items and not simply include them in the Scene options. For example, having the "Landscape" as a "Mode" and "Night Landscape" as a "Scene" is difficult to understand. One feature that we liked is that pressing the telephoto end of the zoom toggle while in "Scene" selection will yield a brief but helpful explanation of the selected scene's abilities and uses.

One notable scene that Nikon includes in every camera is the "Panoramic Assist." This allows you to shoot an image, move the camera left or right and see one third of the previously shot image included as a semi-transparent overlay on the LCD screen. It's a wonderful feature for shooting panoramic images and ensures consistently accurate framing that makes stitching the images together on your computer a breeze. The only way that Nikon could improve this system is by having an auto-stitch feature incorporated into the camera, so that when you download the image(s), they are already processed, stitched and ready for viewing. Once you've done all of the post processing and stitching, you can get great big, high quality panos that are ready for printing and framing.

The selection dial also has a setting for video, and the P50 is able to shoot 640x480 pixel VGA resolution video 29.9 frames per second. Additionally, the P50 can shoot half screen (320 pixel) and quarter screen (160 pixel) video for the Web. A nice surprise in Nikon's video features is that unlike similar sub-$200 cameras, the P50 has full optical zooming capabilities while shooting full motion video. Most cameras in this price range require you to stop shooting, change the lens focal length and then start shooting again, but the P50 allows you to continue shooting full motion with sound while you change the focal length of the lens. The zooming action during this recording is completely silent and silky-smooth. The effect, in essence, is similar to that of a much more expensive video camera. The video feature also records mono sound and saves all of it to a Windows AVI file. Unlike some of the recent compacts by Samsung, there's no pausing during a single clip, so every time you stop and start video capture, it writes a new file.

The P50's ability to shoot time-lapse movies at 30 second, 1, 5, 10, 30 and 60 minute intervals between images is another pleasant surprise for a camera in the budget price range. The camera combines these images into a single AVI file (without sound) that can be viewed on your computer or output to a DVD. Nikon doesn't stop there though, because they've also installed monochrome and sepia modes for movie making as well, adding a bit of fun to your frames while adding value to the overall movie options package.

Conclusion

In all, the P50 is an excellent performer for the money and in comparison to other economical compact cameras, is a really excellent deal. It is a simple camera that doesn't require a lot of user-defined input to make an image. Its simple appearance is deceptive to the average person, yet the technology packed into this camera is total sophistication. Nikon's genius in the design is to make the end user unaware of this sophistication through the simplicity of its'form and function. If you have less than two bills to drop on a camera, you should seriously consider the Nikon Coolpix P50.